Back in the Jackson office doing paperwork. Hardly doing it. ADHD before it had a name. Incapable of applying myself well to
tasks I wasn't interested in. Ed was kind, sent me on errands, had me do physical work like clean up, organize
materials. My co-workers, mainly focused people with a purpose, tolerated me.
They were serious, but there was laughter, kidding around. The stage of my life
was expanding just being there.

Blacks and whites, male and female, together in various
mixes. Lunch at the cafe next door to the COFO office one day, a bunch of us
including some field workers - not people who worked in fields, but COFO staff
who worked in other Mississippi towns. Took a while for me to notice I was the
only white and then I was proud it had taken a while and glad I was there in
this whole new environment. I'd never been on equal terms with blacks before.
How quickly it became normal.

Some had been on the civil rights case since
1960 or earlier - in Jackson, Atlanta, Birmingham, all over. Some were from the
north, some southern, a few California. I'd hear
about all sorts of hardship that the average black citizen had to endure just
living there. Had to be careful where they went, what they said, had to keep a low profile.
I'd listen to people who had known and worked with a few names I recognized like
Medgar Evers. Evers had been murdered in Jackson the year before by a member of
the White Citizens Council.

All I knew when I
arrived was that a lot of blacks had been denied the right to vote. It was worse
than that. There was no place for black people to lay their head when they traveled. They
had to stay with friends or friends of friends or sleep in their cars. Black
churches and businesses had been burned, The KKK wasn't a thing of the past.
There were unreported lynchings. One thing seemed clear - change was most likely
to come with help from outside pressure, media coverage, and the American people becoming
more aware of the extent of discrimination and persecution in the South. The
idea wasn't just to register voters but also to get in the news, and bring about
a change in the culture.

Got out and walked around. Talked to people. Visited the right
Presbyterian Church. Said hello for the Fort Worth minister to youth. Didn't say
what I was doing there. Had become cautious. Most the southern whites I
encountered were random - in a bar, store, park. Local white people would talk
race right off. The coming invasion. They tended to describe a more positive situation than I
gathered. They'd say that everything was going along just fine, that they lived
in harmony with negroes and it would stay that way as long as outside agitators
didn't rile things up. They did acknowledge inside agitators as well, a few bad
blacks and the white trash they'd insist were worse than bad negroes. Never heard a good word said about the Ku Klux Klan but
the White Citizens Councils were not disparaged.

Kept meeting interesting people. A long blond haired bright blue
eyed idealist from Florida passed through. There wasn't a lot of long hair back
then. He'd been in the movement for a year. We talked till late in the office. He
said he always told white
people why he was there and would try to engage them in
conversation - like when he was in a cafe - or hitching and vulnerable. He'd had drivers stop their cars and
tell him to get out. Got slugged a few times. But he said most people would
tolerate, even engage with him. He was like an early disciple of radical
honesty. No way could I be like that. I liked the people there but I didn't let
them know why I was in their territory.

Everyone I met who'd been down there a while with the movement
had been arrested at least once and beaten up by police, an occupational hazard.
But the police knew when to stop. An old black pickup with two guys in white tee
shirts had been cruising back and forth in front of the office. Police had an
eye on them. I was standing outside when they went by and a guy on the passenger
side looked at me with enough malice to make me shiver. I didn't want to meet
him out there. Police didn't want violence or trouble which would be reported.
We liked having them drive by. It got late and I was apprehensive about walking
to the college dorm. I looked around for the pickup and quickly slipped into the
nearby cemetery, lay on raised marble grave memorial, slept soundly till
daybreak. After that, when I wanted to go somewhere to feel safe, I'd go to a
graveyard.

There was a guy from Oklahoma named Jody who was an eccentric
character that I liked hanging out with. He saw I was another weirdo and latched
onto me too. He was a super intellectual who'd been studying linguistics and
would listen to people talking and write phonetic symbols. He showed me what my speech pattern looked like compared to his and to a white woman from Maryland
and then to local blacks whose phonetics he said looked more like French than
English.

Ed met with some Mennonites who lived down on the Gulf Coast.
They were committed to equality and integration for all people. They talked
about working together with Quakers and COFO and not forgetting the plight of
Choctaw Indians, other minorities, and poor whites.

Ran into James Chaney in the office. He'd driven over from
Meridian. We talked for a while. I was glad to see him. He was good natured. He
said he was sorry it didn't work out for me to work with them but that they had
to work within the rules of the organization. Maybe they had other good reasons
as well like the sort of impression I made. I was intense and unsettled.

James had come to town to meet with some visiting dignitary from
India. Everyone in the office was invited to come to a house later for a
get-together.

There were about twenty of us. We sat in a living room, many of us on the
floor. The guest of honor was Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia, introduced as a
member of the Indian Parliament, founder of the Congress Socialist Party of
India, and a close associate of Gandhi in the non violent struggle for civil
rights and independence from British rule. Non violent civil disobedience was
the dominant philosophy of the civil rights movement and here was a man who had
practiced it with Gandhi. Lohia was accompanied by Dr. Ruth Stephan, a poet. He
was a guest of the State Department and she was his guide and host. They had
come to Jackson for him to visit the integrated Togaloo College. He said, he was
delighted to be able to meet with activists in the civil rights movement in
America.

He told about what an eventful afternoon they'd had. They'd gone to lunch at
a cafeteria and were refused service. Dr. Lohia's skin was quite dark. They in
return refused to leave. This went back and forth until the police arrived.
There may have been an interesting exchange about race, color, country, status,
segregation but the police sided with the cafeteria and asked them to leave.
They again refused, were taken away in a paddy wagon, and driven around for an
hour while the arresting officers and surely their higher ups wondered what to
do with them. Finally they just let them out in the middle of some neighborhood
and an international incident was avoided. Dr. Lohia related the experience with
a smile. Dr. Stephan seemed to share his enjoyment. Later in the evening he
recalled harsher treatment by the British that called for far greater challenges
to his forbearance and commitment to non violence. He encouraged his audience to
have faith in themselves and their cause, promising they will find inner
strength when they need it. He said they had massive sit-ins which the British
authorities tried to break up and they were able to sit in the midst of tear gas
without moving. Then the army would come in with clubs to beat them and drag
them off and sometimes take them away to be tortured.

When people left, I stayed and talked for a while with Lohia and Stephan. I
asked him more about the torture. He said one can only experience so much pain
before passing out, that there's nothing we can't endure if we're resolved, no
obstacle that can prevent us from attaining our goal if we are firmly dedicated.